"War of Art" Period

An exercise in using darks. I utilized my 8B, 7B, and 9B pencils on the shirt and used a kneaded eraser to get the folds just right on the subject's left sleeve. The bead work was captured by painstakingly rendering each strand then each bead one by one. This portrait, which took just under three months to complete, won BEST OF SHOW at the 2005 Rochester Fair (N.H.).